Oh man, I can’t believe it’s been almost an entire YEAR since I last published here! I’m so sorry… there’s been a lot going on, and also I’m fairly certain I’ve been actually depressed for the last year or so and only very recently started perking up a bit (like literally a couple weeks ago) so that’s probably part of the reason… PhD life and its ups and (mostly, at least in my case) downs, an unexpected and lengthy authorship battle… etc etc… so it was hard to find anything positive to write about, and/or to summon enough energy/brainpower to write about anything at length in general. But that’s fodder for another post.

Today what I’m going to write about (briefly) is publishing! Yay, publishing… the currency and lifeblood of the academic. In case you weren’t aware, basically what, where, and how much you publish is an important factor for your career, mainly because all the people/agencies with money (institutions looking to hire you, government/other organizations looking to award grants) use it as a kind of surrogate measure of your scientific worth when evaluating whether or not to hire you/give you money. In a way, it’s like judging you based on your contribution to society’s advancement, which I guess is fair, especially if you’re using, say, government funds to help your research. Where it gets a little tricky however, is when you get into the question of where the articles are being published, and whether quantity > quality, and that’s different for everyone. There’s a whole discussion to be had about the Impact Factor of journals (which itself has some controversy based on how it is determined), but that might have to wait for another time. In terms of quantity vs quality, from what I gather, I think (a very big emphasis on “think”) the general consensus is that quality is of course important, but publishing regularly (at least every year or so, even if it’s only a review paper) is highly desired because it shows consistency. Which is bad news for someone like me, who hasn’t even had a single (first author) publication yet, and it’s already my 4th/last year in the program (hopefully anyway), heh.

At any rate, after you submit your paper for publication, assuming it isn’t rejected outright, it goes to a couple reviewers. These are usually other scientists, usually in a related field of study, but sometimes not. They review the paper and help the editors of the journals determine whether the paper is ready to be either 1) accepted as is, 2) accepted with revisions, or 3) rejected. The first two options are obviously preferred 😛 but if it needs to be revised, the manuscript authors need to address all the reviews (either by doing more experiments or rebutting with explanations why they don’t need to), and resubmit. This process I hear can take anywhere up to a few weeks to a few months! I just submitted my first PhD-related paper a couple weeks ago, so will try to update on how that process goes after I hear back. It is currently in the “under review” status (so at least that means it wasn’t rejected outright, hopefully!)

Anyway, what actually prompted this post was that I got an e-mail from the director of the pre-doctoral training fellowship I’m currently on as a follow-up to a discussion we had about hosting a seminar for all the trainees to learn how to review a paper (something we will all be called to do as scientists in the future). It was quite an amusing article on how to review papers by Greg Gibson, who apparently was a section editor for PLoS Genetics for 10 years, which exemplifies the type of feedback that was often receive from these things… and really, now that I think about it, it must be pretty difficult to have to constantly make executive decisions as an editor as to whose review gets the most weight if they are this scattered, haha! But anyway, just wanted to re-post that all here for you guys in case you’re curious how these things work.

Until next time! (Which will hopefully be less than a year from now! ^.^||)